As the number of users viewing information and purchasing items electronically increases, there is a corresponding increase in the amount of advertising revenue spent in electronic environments. In some cases, advertisements are specifically selected for certain pages or other interfaces displayed to a user. In other cases, these advertisements are selected based on content that can be displayed in any of a number of different pages. For example, a user might search for information about a keyword through a search engine. When a results page is returned to the user that includes search results relating to that keyword, at least one advertisement can be included with the results page that relates to the keyword and/or search results. Often, the advertisement includes a hypertext link or other user-selectable element that enables the user to navigate to another page or display relating to the advertisement.
The selection of the link to include with the advertisement, and thus the page to which the user may navigate (hereinafter referred to as the “landing page”), should be determined such that the user viewing the advertisement on the search results page not only will be interested in following the link, but in the case of advertising an item, also will be likely to buy or otherwise consume the advertised item. In past systems, certain landing pages were selected for specific categories that included a number of keywords, such that whenever one of those keywords was submitted by a user the advertisement for a general category would be shown, which might not be very relevant to the actual keyword that was submitted. In some systems, a number of landing pages might be suggested for a keyword or category, and the landing page would be selected based upon a rating or identity of the source for each landing page. For example, in an electronic marketplace there might be several sellers, departments, etc., offering items in a given category, each of which might suggest a landing page for that category. Each source could submit a keyword-landing page pair, for example, wherein the source suggests that a particular landing page be used when advertising for that keyword. Such an approach does not take into account various factors that can increase revenue, conversions, etc., or otherwise result in a dynamic selection of an optimal landing page to display to a user.
Further, in many cases there will be multiple advertisers bidding or otherwise attempting to have their advertisement(s) displayed for a given keyword. If an entity such as a search engine provider takes into account advertiser ratings based upon factors such as the appropriateness of the landing page to the keyword, then more careful attention should be paid to the landing page suggested for each keyword. For electronic marketplaces or other large advertisers where there may be millions of keywords, manually tracking and continually optimizing each keyword-landing page pair is impractical. Further, previous static approaches are not flexible enough to adjust the landing pages as needed based on a variety of criteria to continually provide an optimal landing page for various keywords.